Forum:2018-12-26 (Wednesday)
Discussion for comic for . Ask not what your wiki can do for you, ask what you can do for your wiki. ---- Whoa. Talk about a Time Abyss. 5000 years ago. Also, I am not liking that device that Luc is holding in the flashback. Looks too much like some precursor component to the Spark Wasp Engine. --MadCat221 (talk) 05:41, December 26, 2018 (UTC) To add to the timeline speculation from last page, we also need to consider that: 1. Thanks to the beacon engine, there could be multiple Lucrezia "paths" (for example, Young Lucrezia records herself into the beacon engine, then goes off into the past while Lu-in-Agatha does her thing.) : Pondering: with the Refuge of Storms mirror melted, the Mechanicsburg mirror in the time stop, and the others gone black, Lucrezia-as-anyone may no longer have access to the network and thus no time travel. (That is until Agatha figures it out, meets the Enigma, goes to Geisterland with Gil, etc.) This means that she can't go back and warn herself that her daughter is the one to watch out for.9thGeneral (talk) 17:15, December 26, 2018 (UTC) 2. Different-time Lucrezias could be communicating (for example, Lu-in-Agatha might have known about the trapped Muse of Time because the freed Muse of Time told Young Lucrezia about it.) Tryingtobewitty (talk) 06:45, December 26, 2018 (UTC) : Possibly, but at some point, this can't be allowed or else she would become omniscient and unstoppable. Recall that at some point, "it all went wrong". If current (in our timeline) Lucrezia knows it all went wrong and sometime in our future has access to time travel again, presumably, she'd want to fix whatever went wrong. I shaved with Occam's Razor this morning, and the simplest answer seems to be that post-Other War Lucrezia got trapped by Van Rijn, watched him operate the trap, and then escaped to some point to put her conciousness in the Summoning Machine. See? Simple. 9thGeneral (talk) 17:15, December 26, 2018 (UTC) :: Possible, but I've been working with the idea that the Lucrezia in the Beacon Engine is not the Lucrezia who's been on a time-traveling adventure. We also have to consider that the Lucrezias aren't all on the same page, so Young Lucrezia's "it all went horribly wrong" could be Old Lucrezia's "just as planned". If whatever went wrong is what shattered her mind, then it's entirely possible that post-shattering Lucrezia actually arranged for that to happen to her younger self. Note that this still doesn't make her omniscient - I expect that Lucrezia's final defeat will involve doing something to the (chronologically) oldest Lucrezia to keep her from warning her younger selves. Tryingtobewitty (talk) 07:34, December 28, 2018 (UTC) ::: Interesting! Perhaps the different Lucrezias are fighting each other for dominance since no single instantiation would want to play second fiddle to anyone including an obviously inferior copy of herself. In the fight or an attempted mind-meld, her minds are shattered. 9thGeneral (talk) 14:31, December 28, 2018 (UTC) Well, it's nice that Albia is committing herself to the cause. Of course, destroying Lucrezia will be extra difficult because of all her copies -- reminds one of Beausoleil. Maybe that's the point of all this time-jumping? Apart from any specific goal in a specific time, she just wants to be in so many times and places that she can fix any gaps when one of her bodies dies. Although killing the Queens suggests that she wants to rule all of space and time unopposed. (Personally, I would find that really boring and onerous; I'm surprised Albia isn't sick of it.) Finally, if it turns out that Lucrezia is her own mother, I am going back in time myself and making the Foglios rewrite the offending page at gunpoint. Bkharvey (talk) 07:22, December 26, 2018 (UTC) : I mean. In this case, "committing to the cause" might mean brain-coring Agatha to find out more about the Other no matter how much Albia would rather keep Agatha around. (I also suspect the 'others' Beausoleil was working with includes Lucrezia-Anevka. Clank bodies, biological-mechanical transference, multi-corporeal conciousness...) PhoenixTalion (talk) 17:14, December 26, 2018 (UTC) : Unfortunate that Gil is behind the curve still, or he could point Albia at Zola, who is both a source of information, and a dangerous threat in herself. May still make a go at it towards the 'Queen of the Dawn.' But yeah, Albia is going to be fully marshalling all her considerable resources, and also going to be giving some serious thoughts of what to do with Agatha. 'Black' Victor Cachat (talk) 18:00, December 26, 2018 (UTC) :: What do you mean by "behind the curve"? He knows about Zola, including that she escaped from the Castle with a copy of Lucrezia. I guess he missed the party, so he may not know that Zola is Queen of the Dawn, but isn't that why he has spies? Bkharvey (talk) 07:07, December 27, 2018 (UTC) ::: He's been chasing after Tarvek and is now cut off in England. It may have been a while since he's been able to talk to his spies. On the other hand, who knows what Tarvek told him when they were together. --Geoduck42 (talk) 02:41, December 28, 2018 (UTC) So it looks like 1. the Mirrors were taken out specifically to stop Lucrezia. 2. Lucrezia must have known she would not succeed in killing Albia. PhoenixTalion (talk) 17:31, December 26, 2018 (UTC) : How do you figure the Mirrors went black to stop Lucrezia? At the time of the four-Queen meeting, they didn't know why the Mirrors stopped working. Presumably all the other Queens were killed instantly, like Nyx. I think that all but Sianna's were sabotaged by Lucrezia. Bkharvey (talk) 07:07, December 27, 2018 (UTC) :: I mean, the connection didn't cut out right before Lucrezia could come kick Albia's butt on accident. Previously the mirrors and their Queens were being taken out one by one. (And I wonder how many of those dark mirrors were actually broken vs. no longer had anyone on the other side who could operate them.) I'm sure one of the first things Albia did upon arriving in a land far, far away was try to dial her own mirror and go home that way, and found she couldn't. If Sianna had done something on her end to disable Nyx's mirror and keep Lucrezia from following, it presumably also would have only affected that mirror. But the entire system just fails in the nick of time? That's not a coincidence. Or maybe causality is fixed and Lucrezia just didn't bother to pursue Albia because she knows historically she didn't kill Albia.PhoenixTalion (talk) 18:23, December 29, 2018 (UTC) *Given the comment on how "shattered" Lucrezia's mind was that day, we cannot really say if she even recognized Albia. 'Black' Victor Cachat (talk) 18:00, December 26, 2018 (UTC) :: Even if she didn't recognize Albia (especially with her many faces), she should have still known when conceiving this plan that she'd fail to eliminate at least one Queen.PhoenixTalion (talk) 21:53, December 26, 2018 (UTC) Given all the theories about Lucrezia, I am wondering what Albia meant by "intriguingly bent." Did she mean it as a metaphor for how gift and imaginative she was, or did she mean it more literally as in a non-standard Spark brain? 'Black' Victor Cachat (talk) 18:00, December 26, 2018 (UTC) What if excessive time/mirror travel progressively damages the human traveler? Lucrezia is steadily degrading and thus has to store/transfer her consciousness since her feeble human body is crumbling. Recall that the recently restored version of L-in-A had forgotten about sleep so maybe she's been cyborg for some time (from her perspective) now. 9thGeneral (talk) 18:21, December 26, 2018 (UTC) Who put the Mirrors in place originally? Was it the 7th dimensional beings? I am reminded of the line “I don't want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we're going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.” Speaking of closing loops, at some point, we may realize that Lucrezia is trapped in a causal loop like “He” from the Stainless Steel Rat third book. At this point, however, it seems more likely that she is on a path that looks linear from her point of view. The branching of her personality into Agatha, Zola, Anevka, etc. add to those forward-moving lines, but have we seen anything that indicates they loop back on themselves? Can Callings transcend time? 9thGeneral (talk) 18:21, December 26, 2018 (UTC) Interesting to note that 5,000 y.o. Albia already had the ability to recognize a shattered mind in a split second during combat. This was before her second breakthrough, IIRC. Albia poses/teases the big question: what could have shattered Lucrezia’s mind? Was it Robur’s Angels? Was it this shattering that led her to become the Other? Or was it some part of the Geister brain transferring summoning/beacon gizmo. Perhaps instead of Rezzok Tig-Zaffa, there is such a thing as a mutual brain shatter if the “Calling” crosses the time streams. 9thGeneral (talk) 18:21, December 26, 2018 (UTC) :No, no it wasn't. Her second breakthrough was what MADE her a Goddess, though whether this was triggered by her defeat of of Lozz or the discovery of the other God-Queens and their mirrors isn't stated. If our estimate of what "before the Channel" is correct, she could have been a Goddess for over a thousand years before the mirrors went dark. PhoenixTalion (talk) 21:53, December 26, 2018 (UTC) : The first memories of the mirrors are before her , but information gained from the mirrors lead to the second ascension. Since she didn't gain new information from the mirrors after they went dark, I would guess today's strip happened after the second ascension. (But she could have ascended later using previously obtained information.) She doesn't have stars before her second ascension, and she has stars today. The stars suggest second ascension to me. Argadi (talk) 21:57, December 26, 2018 (UTC) :: Got it. I wonder if that circle of hardware around Agatha when she "peeped into the infinite" is the analog to Albia's stars. 9thGeneral (talk) 22:13, December 26, 2018 (UTC) :: Today's panel 3 shows a Lucrezia with no eye prosthesis. (That is, Lucrezia visited Albia before attacking the Queens. At the time of the visit, she might not even have been the Other yet. ➤ ::: Yeah. I'd say she did something to herself/had something happened that made her the Other, and whatever it was, it probably happened long after she visited England. --Geoduck42 (talk) 02:41, December 28, 2018 (UTC) :My theory on this is that Lucrezia's personality pattern in the Beacon Engine isn't overwritten when updated, but added to. Like, if the Anevka version of Lucrezia copies her memories of the past two years into the summoning device, then Lucrezia-in-Agatha and Lucrezia-in-Zola do the same thing, she doesn't forget the previous two sets of memories, but future callings will remember that period of time three different ways. That seems like it could cause some... cognitive dissonance long term, particularly if one Lucrezia has a life-changing experience like oh, being trapped in a disembodied state for a long, long, time. PhoenixTalion (talk) 18:23, December 29, 2018 (UTC) It's only Albia's first memory of the Mirrors that comes before her 2nd ascention. The Other attack comes way after that, enough after for Albia to be well established in her godhood. Bkharvey (talk) 00:52, December 27, 2018 (UTC) The Last panel of this page has changed! Fred1740 (talk) 18:25, December 28, 2018 (UTC) : ...Yep. This isn't good for Agatha. And Gil won't be able to tell her she's moved from 'interesting shiny object' to 'potential threat and source of long-awaited answers' without triggering Klaus.exe PhoenixTalion (talk) 18:23, December 29, 2018 (UTC) :: More of a plot-induced change. If there was a raging goddess-queen stomping around Europa hunting The Other, there would be little room for Agatha and team. 9thGeneral (talk) 03:00, January 2, 2019 (UTC)